The Easel

17th December 2019

Down through the layers: the paintings of Mark Bradford

The buzz around American artist Mark Bradford grows unabated. Once a hairdresser, he now boasts a McArthur “genius” Award, featured artist at the Venice Biennale, auction room stardom and more. Morgan Meis takes a closer look.

“[A]s a hairdresser, you’d never want to forget that, beneath the waves and shine and flow of all that hair, is an actual person. The content matters. It sure as hell matters when you are doing someone’s hair … Bradford’s paintings wiggle back and forth on that tense razor’s edge where the intense and often socially explosive nature of the paintings’ content always threatens to disrupt the aesthetic space of the canvas. Bradford’s work is powerful because these two forces are in conflict, the from-a-distance aesthetic effect versus the freighted social meaning of his raw materials.”

In Defense of Maurizio Cattelan’s Banana

You may have heard about a banana taped to the wall of a booth at Art Basel Miami. Three editions of the “work” were sold, for big money. Was it meant to be serious? Satire is always serious. Is it art? Cue Warhol’s observation – art “is what you can get away with”. The sense of art world critique is overwhelming: “Buying art now is about being seen in the right circles and acquiring the right names.”

David Hammons follows his own rules

A classic. A backgrounder about David Hammons, the reclusive artist “at the summit of the art world”, for whom “lords of the art world turn somersaults”. ““I just can’t talk about how [my artworks] came about, because it’s so personal—it’s almost like raping me to talk about it.” Hammons, I realized, was close to tears. Dodie said, “We don’t have to talk about that, or about anything. It’s wonderful just to be here.””

Stretching the Canvas

Postwar US government sponsored schools had a narrow view of native American art. Baskets, ceramics, beadwork, flat narrative painting. Of course, as a big New York show illustrates, that idea didn’t last. American Indian art now reflects the stylistic profusion of modern art with its own diversity of voices. Says one, who found inspiration in de Kooning’s work, “We’re native, but we’re all these layers on top”.

Michel Laclotte with Joachim Pissarro

Some say the Louvre is the world’s most important museum. Laclotte, a former director, reflects on his experience and the dilemmas of museum management. Should curators or managers be in control? Why the hostility toward the Louvre’s famous glass pyramid? Should contemporary art be combined with an historical collection? Any regrets? Yes – missed acquisitions. “I am almost more interested in the paintings didn’t get!”

Portraits for the People

JR calls himself a “wallpaper artist” … not that that tells you much. Photographing people from local communities, he pastes their huge blown up images onto building exteriors. It seems almost an extension of graffiti – ephemeral, anti-authoritarian, local. In his words “I was [doing graffiti] to say ‘I exist,’ then I started pasting pictures of people with their names to say they exist. I feel safe when I see graffiti because it shows there’s life.”

Pierre Soulages: Beyond black

Soulages, a national treasure in France, is getting a rare solo exhibition at the Louvre. His paintings are abstract – exercises in colour, texture and mark making – and for decades done entirely in black. Unlike the New York abstract expressionists,  Soulages doesn’t see his black works as an art ‘endgame’. “There is no progress in art, only techniques that are perfected”.  A discussion of the Louvre show is here.

10th December 2019

Simon Callow on Michelangelo: the most heroic toiler of the human race

At 37, Michelangelo’s most glorious artistic achievements were done. What came next was … architecture. After many notable projects, at age 71, he took on St. Peter’s Basilica. It was by far the world’s biggest building project, already 40 years in the making and a disaster. Michelangelo brought a sculptor’s sensibility to its design, remaking the vocabulary of architecture. As an architecture historian notes “It’s Michelangelo’s church, and no one else’s.”

The Baltimore Museum of Art Made a Pledge to Buy Art by Women. Is It Just a Stunt?

Just 4% of artworks held by the Baltimore Museum of Art are by women artists. <Blink> The museum now proposes a “canon correction” – in 2020 it will only purchase works by women. Women’s groups seem underwhelmed. Curators can propose new directions, but “museum committees review them, and the board of trustees approves them.” Such changes to acquisition processes “can take years to reach a verdict”.

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize

Can portrait photography survive the tsunami of social media images? A prestigious photographic prize indicates portraiture is doing just fine, thanks to its narrative ability. A bigger problem, says one critic, is the prize’s biases. Why must so many shortlisted photographers come from New York? And why the emphasis on gender and sexuality, “every modern gallery curator’s favourite subject”? More images are here.

‘A buffet of bums, boobs and bollocks’ – Giulio Romano at Palazzo Te

The Italian Renaissance was not all high-minded intellectualizing. There was also a lot of thought about sex. While street posters of erotic images were considered pornographic, bawdy paintings, luxuriously detailed and in a palace, were respectable. Romano’s paintings in Palazzo Te are the most celebrated series of sex scenes of the Italian Renaissance. Titillation was not the only aim. “The phallic [was] less straightforwardly sexual and more about power.”

MFAH Gonzalez retrospective brings exposure to an important Latin American voice

González rarely paints from real life, instead mining images from press clippings. These are re-worked in a way that gives them a Pop sensibility. Their focus, however, is not consumerism but the endless violence and social tensions of her native Columbia. Little has improved over the decades, so this retrospective does not “end with sunshine”. She makes, she says, “underdeveloped paintings for underdeveloped countries.”

A great wave of Hokusai

Hokusai’s works are mostly on paper, susceptible to light damage and thus rarely shown. This Washington show reflects his main themes – reverence for nature, Mt Fuji, the details of daily life. It also indicates what a creative oddbod Hokusai must have been. In addition to his paintings and prints – which got better as he aged – he also produced a book of illustrated dance moves and books of his doodles that he titled “manga”.